Hospitals and other patient care services have on-site doctors, nurses, and other caregivers for monitoring interned patients. Patient care services can only monitor a limited number of patients at one time due to availability of patient beds and monitoring equipment (e.g., vital signs monitors). As such, hospitals have a desire to discharge patients as soon as possible in order to free up space and equipment to receive new patients. However, if a patient is discharged early without further monitoring by the patient care provider, the patient can be at risk of potential latent health complications remaining undiscovered until it is too late. Additionally, if the patient is discharged from the patient care provider, the patient cannot easily receive scheduled or impromptu medication doses from the caregiver. As such, there is a need for remote patient monitoring.
Current remote monitoring solutions employ a variety of vital sign measuring and communication solutions that generally require a wireless hub (e.g., an Internet/Bluetooth connection) connected to a patient's home Internet infrastructure to communicate with a remote central station at the hospital or patient care service. This type of setup requires a lengthy installation and configuration process at the patent's home. Other conventional solutions that employ Internet or Bluetooth technology can suffer from delays or interruptions in transmitting multimedia or vital signs data to the remote central station and thus are unsuitable for real-time, continuous monitoring. Further, a skilled technician, doctor, or nurse is needed at the patient's home to operate the monitoring equipment as a specialist at the remote hospital examines the patient.
It is in regard to these issues and others that the present invention is provided.